On Saturday night, right at the close, Black dropped to the floor as if his knees were under the influence of a giant magnet. OK, so the landing was a little trembly, but his chin was tilted high into the lights and his shoulders impressively held their line. And this wasn’t even during his routine. It was when the news of the viewers’ phone vote was broken to him and he realised that the public had spared him the chop.

Despite the prevailing advice of the judges, Black and his partner, Camilla, will be back for week six and the relief pulled Black to the floor. Right there, you saw what it meant to the former middle-distance expert turned BBC sports presenter. The pride of the erstwhile athlete clearly burns on in retirement and those hair-trigger competitive instincts are intact. Make no mistake, Black hasn’t come this far in his career to lose out to Aled Jones.

And neither has Denise Lewis. The golden vision of an athletics one-two in television’s most competitive celebrity-based challenge is gorgeously alive. And let’s be clear, this is television’s toughest celebrity endurance show. Ignore the hype; it’s Strictly Come Dancing, and not I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, that asks the big questions, including, centrally, can you shake what you’ve got on a Saturday night in a mixed field containing Julian Clary? You’ll need grit, you’ll need nerve, you’ll need balls of steel, not to mention a wildly broadminded notion of what constitutes a shirt.

For heaven’s sake, on Strictly Come Dancing the celebrities are actually required to perform. Contrast the Australian jungle-dwellers, occasionally stirring themselves stiffly from their sleeping bags to put their heads in a bucket of slugs provided by Ant and Dec. Money for nothing.

It’s the main reason that this column is backing Lewis and Black to go all the way. They are bred to handle it, in a way that Sarah Manners from Casualty and Jill someone-or-other from EastEnders probably are not. Plus they are used to being seen in public in small amounts of man-made fibre.

That said, let’s put up a hand and admit that Black had a nightmare in the samba. He was clearly in trouble in rehearsals and having considerable difficulty reaching his inner Latino. “I’ve got to find a new spirit inside of me,” Black said.

My feeling is that the music wasn’t helping. Remember, this is a man with the style and taste to quote Prefab Sprout in the epigraph to his autobiography, a man to be found in the audience at Roddy Frame gigs. He’s given little indication, up to now, that the sounds of Brazil, as strained through the close-meshed sieve that is Laurie Holloway and his band, was likely to set his soul on fire.

“Clumsy”, “ungainly”, “awkward”, “no bounce”, “terrible” — just some of the slightly less supportive verdicts from the judges on the samba delivered by Black on Saturday. “This dance sorts the men from the boys,” Arlene Phillips said, “and tonight, Roger, you were a boy.” Roger disagreed. “I think I gave it 100 per cent,” he said. “I felt like a man tonight.”

Hands up who expected to see Black in a conversation such as this when he was going for Olympic and Commonwealth glory in the 400 metres.

Maybe the surroundings, too, got to Black. For round five, the programme had decamped to the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool. Talk about living the dream. The Tower Ballroom is, as Bruce Forsyth needlessly reminded us on the night, “the home of ballroom dancing”. It’s like Santa’s Grotto, only with louder music and bigger elves, and its high-class illuminations contain enough light bulbs to illuminate the whole of Scotland through five long winters.

It’s not going too far to say that, for those in the know, the phrase “sent to the Tower” is not automatically associated with a long incarceration followed by a beheading; it evokes being granted the opportunity to head north in big sleeves and turn in a high-scoring samba to Barry Manilow’s Copacabana — an important distinction. If you dance and own chiffon, the Tower is Wembley. Except, of course, it’s finished and it isn’t costing upwards of £750 million.

Black was humbled, but Lewis rose to it: “Sultry, exotic, sexy, the queen of the carnival!” No question of Denise falling into the drop zone with Roger. He survived, but he needs to kick on from here. It’s the rumba next week. Let’s hope he’s man enough.